For the past 30 years, Maria Salome Ujano, known by her peers as Sally, has called in ahead of daybreak every day to tend to battered wives and exploited children in 24-hour shifts. It has been her longstanding commitment as a survivor herself, aware that at any given moment, a voice may be expunged, a womanhood soiled, and a narrative threatened to never see the light of day. 

But such benign work in counseling would later be seen by the state as a target for repression. In 2021, she would be arrested on fabricated charges of rebellion. 

Yet, Sally’s model of care blooms in the face of oppression. It is her boundless care that had her detained in the overcrowded Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong, but it is also this same care that has delivered justice to hundreds of maltreated women like her.

Safety Measures

Sally’s compassion was steeled in the crucible of her own past trauma. At the age of five, she had survived incest rape, per a memoir she wrote before her detention. She remained a regular quarry to gender-based discrimination from male acquaintances, and emotional abuse by male partners as an adolescent. During these times, there was scarcely a crisis worker whom she could turn to for help.

Soon, she learned that the state would not extend her a helping hand, either. During Martial Law, she, like many other rights advocates, was imprisoned on raps of rebellion. 

Four years after her release, she joined the Women’s Crisis Center (WCC) in 1989 and administered Stress Tension Reduction Therapy, used specifically for children and women who had been tortured during Martial Law. She served more than 10 victim-survivors every day in WCC’s small headquarters in L. Guinto, Manila. 

Sally undergoing a Stress Tension Reduction Therapy course in Denmark with her colleagues. (Prescilla Tullipat)

After going full-time in 1992, she began entertaining councilees past 5 a.m., usually newly beaten by their intoxicated husbands. “Binigay [ni Sally] lahat ng kaniya, pati time sa asawa at anak ay napunta sa aktibismo,” said Prescilla Tulipat, a co-worker of Sally from WCC. Sally would then serve as Executive Director of WCC from 2000 until its dissolution in 2007 due to severe underfunding. The institution was able to serve around 4,000 victim-survivors. 

Prescilla currently works at the Office of Anti-Sexual Harassment in her capacity as University Extension Specialist. She helps sieve cases of harassment and sees to it that victims receive justice. (Luisa Elago / Philippine Collegian)

Yet despite such mental toil, Karla, Sally’s daughter, believes her mother raised them to be emotionally intelligent adults. “Siya yung nanay na parang kabarkada lang namin. Hindi kami nahihiyang magsabi sa kanya. Matiyaga siya sa paggabay sa amin,” she told the Collegian.

Sally’s trademark tenderness is simple–she administers quiet amid chaos, and a warm embrace where solace is an unfamiliar concept. This manifested in Sally’s encounter with an incest victim who had been taken advantage of by her father. 

“Kada session nila, hindi nagsasalita ang bata. Pero nandoon lang [si Sally], naghihintay hanggang makapagsalita ang bata. Ganon siya katiyaga para makatulong sa isang biktima,” Tulipat recounted.

The Diliman Gender Office is fiercely committed to upholding gender rights in the university and works with the Office of Anti-Sexual Harassment to help victim-survivors in the university. (Luisa Elago / Philippine Collegian)

Sally broadened her advocacies in 2008, when she became the national coordinator of Philippines Against Child Trafficking (PACT). “Hindi ka makaka-empower ng nanay kapag ihihiwalay ang anak,” Tulipat explained, adding that Sally always used to tend to her clients’ children in WCC’s temporary shelter. Under her wing, PACT built networks from Metro Manila to Maguindanao that equipped communities to protect trafficked children. 

Sally’s persistence has also translated into landmark legislation, as she helped in lobbying and drafting the 2004 Anti-Violence Against Women and their Children Act. The policy provided the legal basis for protecting women abused by their partners, as well as their children.

Sally’s care framework, then, is a struggle against a culture of violence. Her compassion is a full-fledged counterattack against a state that represses dissenting voices.

State Interventions

The contours of Sally’s compassion, however, would be stretched to intense proportions on November 14, 2021, when she was arrested for the second time.

Showing neither identification nor a warrant, a troop of plainclothes policemen infiltrated Sally’s residence in Malolos, Bulacan. They hedged her while she was in her car, besieging her until she disembarked. One by one, the state would foil her rights the same way it had done 30 years ago. 

“I’m fearing for my life. You have to tell me your names. I’ve experienced this, kaya hindi ako pwedeng sumama sa inyo,” she said while surrounded by state forces. 

Linus Galias of the Free Legal Assistance Group represented Sally. According to him, her charge was a rehash of her Martial Law rebellion raps. But this time, she was incriminated in an armed encounter in Quezon at three in the morning, sometime in November 2005. 

Galias’s team, however, found a magazine clipping showing Sally in a Manila seminar, and another document saying she was in Tagaytay, on the alleged dates of the encounter. But the judge shot such evidence down. “We filed a motion to amend it. Dineny [ng judge]. Nadismiss din ng Court of Appeals (COA) … so yung strongest naming evidence, hindi talaga cinonsider.” 

As of December 2023, 164 out of the country’s political prisoners were women. All of them tell the same story as Sally–of being detained over trumped-up charges and put away simply for looking after fellow victims of state violence. 

Sally was detained for one year in Camp Bagong Diwa. More than 70 people resided in a cell, complicating her active hypertension, back pain, and other health conditions. Though Sally was released on bail on December 29, 2022, a final ruling on May 16 sentenced her to imprisonment from 10 to 17 years.

“It was in those sessions [in WCC] that I realized and healed from my own victimization at different stages of my life,” Sally wrote in her memoir. The state’s handicapping of Sally and other women activists by way of imprisonment is their intentional bid not just to withhold care from survivors, but also from empowered women rights defenders like Sally.

Recovery and Empowerment

For Karla, her mother’s arrest exposes a state increasingly complacent with attacking women dissenters. “Kung ang aking nanay nga na visible sa public, kaya nilang arestuhin at sampahan ng gawa-gawang kaso, paano pa kaya ang ibang tao na limitado ang kakayahan na depensahin ang sarili?” However, the state’s brazenness also gives Sally further impetus for her activism.

The campaign for Sally’s freedom glows anew, as her counsel recently raised a motion for her bail to the COA. However, the hearings for such have seen sluggish processing. Galias, then, believes that the legal playing field political prisoners move around in can be improved by eliminating delaying tactics. A deadline for court justices’ ruling on motions for bail, appeals for reconsideration, and the like must be imposed, he said.

But these changes must span past the micro level. The Supreme Court’s move on May 8 to recognize red-tagging as a hazard to liberty and security is a viable benchmark for future moves to be made in the legal arena. Though more legal headway must be made, it is a step toward pre-empting such cases as Sally’s.

Until such time that another motion is threshed out in court, Sally will continue to tirelessly provide the ministries of her care. “Siya yung nagbibigay ng wisdom sa kapwa inmates,” said Galias. Like she did 30 years ago, she continues to supply care in spaces where it is direly needed.

For wherever Sally goes is a woman who looks like her–an inmate estranged from her grandchildren, a wife struggling to hide her bruises, or a child with no one left to turn to. And as long as this culture of violence and impunity continues to thrive, Sally will continue to find the tenacity to oppose it–one treated victim-survivor at a time. ●